Quite the contrary! They effectively sell their cards at a ~20% discount to a bunch of AI companies by “investing” in the companies for a promise to use that money to buy their cards.

It’s as dumb as it sounds and textbook unsustainable economic bubble behavior, but NVidia don’t care because more sales = more stonks = more money to “invest” = more sales = more stonks = more yachts for Jensen. So what if it makes 1929 look like a walk in the park, it’s not their problem.

On maybe the third day of my first programming job, a colleague pulled me aside and said “don’t give me ‘shoulds’ and ‘probablys’. You need to sound confident so I can know to trust what you’re saying”.

That guy was a bit of a dickhead in general but there’s a lot of truth there. To the question “what’s the expected impact of this change?”, “None.” is a good answer. “Well it should work…” is not useful feedback and a good Operations Manager will rightfully reject the change.

Of course it is better to be hesitant than falsely confident, but far too many (software) engineers hide behind indecisive language to dodge the necessary hard work of validating their hunches. If you didn’t test your shit fully, just say so. If you’re right, say it. Personal ego doesn’t belong in an engineering discussion.

I can’t prove it but I think there is a real sociolinguistic phenomenon where Americans are unusually obsessed with “safety through temperature”. Like they hear “fire = no germs” as children and somehow internalize that steaks should be somewhere between well done and burnt beyond recognition, and dishwashers should boil your plates like you’re sterilizing a hospital gown that’s been thrown up on by an Ebola patient.

Soap, bitches. It works. Even at 40 °C (with modern detergent and washing cycles). Good thing too because I don’t want to know how y’all are having sex if you think boiling water is the only decent cleaning procedure for putting things in your mouth.

??? Of course you do. Investors don’t just buy their way into hypothetical future profits, they buy control over the company. The specifics depend, whether it’s voting shares or the looming threat of debt collection, but the courts will 100 % enforce investors’ right to demand things from companies.

Furthermore the idea that publicly traded companies have some kind of obligation to make as much money as quickly as possible is a reddit-born myth. Shareholders will bring in a CEO, who will be tasked to do whatever and can be fired from the shareholders at any time. Grievous mismanagement and intentional damage can expose a CEO to legal action, just like intentionally destroying tools can expose a worker to legal action. But a CEO acting in good faith has no other obligation than to fulfill the tasks asked of them by shareholders. The problem is that goes wrong when large shareholders plan to sell their shares and need the numbers to look a little better to sell a little higher. But this phenomenon absolutely happens with PE as well – in fact it’s arguably way worse because publicly traded companies at least have legal obligations of financial transparency. Private shareholders can do whatever the fuck they want, including secretly selling their shares to Evil Inc. for them to strip the company for parts and not a single employee has the right to even know who the majority shareholder even is, nervermind what their plan is.

this is all about something Eve did, not something that Eve is.

Except the first sentence applies to all mothers who ever were. It is literally about what women are. Mr Omnipotent couldn’t figure out how to punish Eve without punishing all her daughters throughout all eternity? The mental acrobatics required to not interpret that verse as a call to sexism are olympics-level.

I don’t actually have a vested interest in doing the mental gymnastics either way. But I do find it fascinating how deeply knowledgeable and creative some people get in order to pretend that the Bible is actually woke lmao.

Irregularities != illegitimacy. Independent polling support that Trump had around half of the popular vote. One percent either direction may have changed the outcome but it doesn’t change the legitimacy of the office, either way it was a very close race that either Harris or Trump could have legitimately won.

Therefore it is an absolute braindead take to say that Americans didn’t choose this. They did. That’s not incompatible with the theory that Trump cheated. But the American people doesn’t get to eschew their responsibility in this. Fuck this “no-one admits they voted for Hitler” bullshit.

Who cares about the engineers caught in the crossfire or the lost efficiency, when Manager A can tell Manager B to shove it up theirs so they can show their N+1 a Very Important Project Milestone. That’s an end-of-year bonus right there (for them, not you).

A good manager protects their team from this bullshit. A successful manager actively sabotages the entire company by making sure they get all the prestigious projects and constantly derail everyone else into serving their personal interests.

Does not work around the necessity to get all major retail banks or the central bank on board, as they outline in their FAQ.

There’s no magic bullet, if you want to act as a payment processor you only have a handful of options:

• Do a bank wire (but it’s not pre-authorized so you’re just providing a deposit account for your customers, like PayPal)
• Use Visa/MC (which PayPal falls back to if you have no money in your deposit account)
• Use regional payment processors where they exist (e.g. Bancontact/iDEAL in the Benelux, which Stripe conveniently abstracts for the retailers; however most countries don’t have such a widespread alternative to American payment processors)
• Use physical cash
• Agree on a protocol to pre-authorize transfers on behalf of your customer with all banks your customers are likely to be using (in the EU you can do that with SEPA mandates, which PayPal does support as well)

In practice the EU is doing that last thing with Wero (which already has partnered with all major retail banks in Benelux+France+Germany) and Brazil successfully did the same with Pix. It’s not that the technical part is particularly hard, it’s that convincing the banking sector to adhere to and commercially promote a new standard is a long, expensive, arduous process that requires strong political connections.

I’m sure google is already working on GenAI to “fix” that for you.

I hate the future.

If I am not mistaken the 47.0.0.0/8 ip block is for Alibaba cloud

That’s an ARIN block according to Wikipedia so North America, under Northen Telecom until 2010. It does look like Alibaba operate many networks under that /8, but I very much doubt it’s the whole /8 which would be worth a lot; a /16 is apparently worth around $3-4M, so a /8 can be extrapolated to be worth upwards of a billion dollars! I doubt they put all their eggs into that particular basket. So you’re probably matching a lot of innocent North American IPs with this.

I guess Greek house building was several decades ahead of Belgian house building then, because I’ve yet to see a pre-war house with cavity walls. I guess the cheap coal heating and lack of a need for cooling must have something to do with it.

The 100 years old brick buildings don’t have any voids. That only started post-WWII when ventilation became a real concern.

But even then those houses are likely to have wooden floors and more modern drywall remodeling in some areas. My house is hurricane-proof but not rat-proof.

I love Dune but that game is so powerfully unappealing to me… I didn’t play it so maybe I got the wrong impression from a few minutes of gameplay but it read to me like every generic crafting-survival-base-building live service game from the last 15 years since MC and DayZ. Does it do something subversive or is it really just Rust on Arrakis?

Sure, but I don’t think Waterfall is going to save you from the soul-crushingness in such an environment.

How much of it is due to Agile (which is a very broad concept even though some people mistakenly equate it with scrum), and how much is it due to corporate pressures and inadequate processes though?

I find Agile conceptually meshes a lot better with “standard” product and solutions development thanks to the tighter feedback loops and increased reliance on local expertise over centralized planning. This only gets truer as project complexity grows.

However some companies try to make Agile work with top-down decision making and/or hard deadlines, which are deadly antipatterns. As for lack of time/resources and/or timesheet micro-management, this isn’t a problem unique to Agile nor something that waterfall is exempt from.

Good agile teams are mostly independent and can define their own testing/release cycle as required for a given project; though of course when that happens there are at least a couple layers of management who feel a burning itch to stuff their dirty nosed where they don’t belong because if the team succeeds despite their lack of direct involvement then everyone might realize the emperor has no pants.

That may be true in some truly well organized (usually “legacy big corpo” companies).

Where I’ve worked it’s more like:

• Requirements only cover user-facing features, if that. (Not so) senior engineers are left to bridge the gap between UI mockups and literally everything else.
• Implementation issue is accidentally introduced
• Priority on the bug is lower than new features so no-one has any way to justify working on it
• One day a dev might be personally annoyed enough by the issue that they fix the part as part of some tangentially related work. Else it stays like that forever.

That is a basic side-effect of Agile development. If you have implementation details figured out to such an extent before writing the code, you are not doing agile, you are doing waterfall. Which has a time and a place, but that time and place is typically banking or medical or wherever you’re okay with spending several times the time and money to get maximum reliability (which is a different metric than quality!).

I bet NVIDIA has driver crashes to figure out, and I know which of those issues I’d want them to focus on first if I used their windows driver.

Ironic, IKEA is married to PZ2. Which to be fair is a fine standard (aside from the fact that unaware people tend to confuse it with PH2 then wonder why their screws are stripped), it’s just annoying that I have to switch my drill from T20 to PZ2 to build IKEA furniture.

You know, maybe my grandparents had it right.

It is weird that computers give so little sensory feedback for what they’re doing. Flashlights go click. Cassette decks go clack-vrrrr. Whiteboards go squeek-squeek. Screen sharing goes… nothing, just a small mostly white rectangle on top of my much bigger rectangle until a disembodied, 4 kHz-wide simulacrum of someone’s voice from halfway around the world says “yeah we see your screen”. Unnatural is what it is.

High-five the group of Belgian, Chadian, and Romanian vexillologists who were also sweating profusely throughout.

What?

The house I’m sitting in right now is made out of bricks, with the roof being a untreated wood frame covered in ceramic shingles. No hydrocarbons involved (except for the insulation but that came a good sixty years after initial construction). There are other construction methods besides the American “just wrap it all in vinyl” approach that aren’t necessarily more expensive, such as covering the outside insulation layer with clay/mortar.

The problem isn’t air moisture, at 60 % air RH wood is like 10 % humid and won’t rot. What causes wood to rot is pooling water, something that’s easily avoided by decent house building.